WAR. So I’m reading the forums on Warhammer Alliance. (I think it’s a huge mistake not to have official forums.) Some poster is complaining that he’s played all the classes to level 10 and none of them appealed to him. What was he doing wrong? Some guy wrote back and said “Forget PvE. If you’re here for PvE you will be disappointed. Forget the Scenarios. This is about RvR and if you aren’t out in open RvR and loving it, this game isn’t for you. WAR is for PvPers. Deal with that or leave.” I’m paraphrasing, but the gist was WAR is purely a PvP game and don’t expect anything else from it or you’ll be disappointed.

Well. That means my wife will grow to dislike it soon enough if that’s true. She’s a big PvEr. And, yes, she has a LotRO account as well. She and I are enjoying the PvE aspects of WAR. And when she logs off for the night I’ll hop into the Scenarios and accomplish the occasional RvR lake quests. Being a fan of the scenario’s I suppose I’m part of the problem too. I’m treating the Scenarios as farmable/grindable content for progression xp and gear wise. But isn’t that what I’m supposed to be doing? That’s what they’re there for. Otherwise me alone versus a well formed gang of enemy sounds like zero fun.

Anyway, I seriously doubt Mythic would be shocked, “SHOCKED, I TELL YOU,” if they learned that a few people who’ve come over from WoW are interested in PvE content, solo content, and aren’t there for the RvR primarily. The RvR is a flavor, and not a bad one, but the meal is otherwise full of great graphics and content. (Salzenmund is incredible and I’ve only just now quested through it.) I’ll just go ahead and demand Masala and hope Cayenne isn’t all that’s on offer.

We’ve got a Paladin who’s gone Retribution. (The Pally tanks are on haitus, and the healers are on sabbatical.) A couple weeks back she, the toon’s female, of course, topped the Damage Output chart for our Mount Hyjal run. Most of the damage was Consecration, but white melee hits were in there too. Topped the chart. Over our hunters, our mages, everyone. This was like God’s own Wrath let loose in Mount Hyjal on the mobs and bosses.

But they just got hit with the nerf, from what I’ve read ’round the blogosphere. (Not playing a Pally at that level myself.) And after last night I demand Blizzard nerf me, an Elemental Shaman, in exactly the same way. (My damage output is WAY down in comparison to the Hunters and this Ret Paladin post-patch. My only saving grace is I’m beating the Warlock’s and keeping up with the Mages. But our group pales into insignificance compared to the damage output to the new Hunters and the new Ret Paladin.)

Anyway, last night this Paladin is not #1. Our Feral Druid doing decursing duty on Archimonde is. (Sweet.) The Paladin, however, is either #2 or #3. Most of the damage was white melee damage. It was consecration damage until we reached Archimonde himself.

So that confuses me. If they’re #1 in damage because of consecration I’m picturing this huge mana drain. But then they’re #1 with white melee damage on a single target and I guess they’re swinging some huge monsterous legendary weapon.

Her gear is perfectly ordinary. In fact a Fury Warrior wearing it where we’re going would have gotten sent packing. Vanquisher Leggings out of Heroic Mechanar. Doomplate Shoulders from someplace else. (Where was her +Int gear? I didn’t see any.) This is absolutely not Tier 4, much less Tier 5, gear. Then again, do the Paladins have a Retribution set in the Tier gear?

Anyway, this Paladin is rocking the damage charts and we’re doing all the bosses in Black Temple and Mount Hyjal (except the final ones yet), and she’s in perfectly ordinary gear. What shocked me was the amount of damage she did this last raid. And this is post nerf.

And I forget to mention, she also placed #4 on the healing done chart.

If Pally’s got nerfed I’m sure we’re all wanting some of that koolaide.

Paladins do well at 70 because we don’t scale to 80, we don’t get new levels of these abilities we just scale on gear, so thats basically it. Yes they do a lot of damage, but its level 70, an undead /demon (ie: Paladins should be dealing higher damage than normal, likely pushing them above a pure class), and its AoE, which should push them above any non Lock/Mage.

Though tbh a lock / mage should still win, my lock was doing 6.5kdps in Hyjal.

Frankly, what I find irksome is the way it’s being done (unprecedented amount of hotfixes in an extremely short timeframe), the totally inconsistent communications and the complete lack of vision.

I don’t feel like Blizzard is doing anything but acting in full panic mode at the moment, and that’s not a good way to design or tweak a class.

Mind you, I’m not arguing on the merits of the nerfs, I’m just being quite disgusted with the delivery.

That being said, I ran Bot + Mech in my blue honour PvP gear and a level 60 blue 2-hander (in other words, pretty standard newbie level 70 kit), ended up 3rd in damage dealt behind a Boomkin with only slightly better gear (had 1 piece of vindicator + 1 merc glad). Top of the meters was a tankadin in T4. We were 1% apart each, though, so no big spread.

At this level of kit, I think I’m pretty much where I’m supposed to be at with the toon.

I think the issue right now is that “a” nerf needed to happen, not necessarily the changes that were hotfixed into the game.

One week ago, it was quite obvious that Ret paladins (and arcane mages) needed to be substantially nerfed. Anyone denying that is either lying or insane.

I saw vastly undergeared versions of these specs in both PvE and PvP doing absolutely insane things; topping DPS meters and crushing multiple opponents who had vastly better gear. And ret is still significantly worse because of mana regen and bubble.

Maybe it doesn’t scale well to 80, I don’t know. But if that is the case then Blizzard needed to use Beta (where all these problems have been known for months) to figure out a way to make it scale better and be frontloaded WAY less.

That being said, the hotfix ideas were poor if only because they did adversely affect the Holy and Prot pallies far worse.

Paladins are all over the place at the moment it’s hard to really see the forest with all the trees popping up left and right.

I’ve never seen this kind of ‘hotfixing’ going on on live servers and my inner software developer is screaming bloody murder about it. There’s just no way you can achieve a modicum of balance if you change things every few days.

Let the ret pallies do the damage… tweak them come level 80 when you can actually see proper wws parses coming in with realistic figures.

Everyone is powerful at the moment with the possible exclusion of shadow priests and warlocks which turned out to be kind of ‘meh’ after all this patching.

All in all it means very little… Blizzard would be well advised to ride out the storm and see how things pan out come level 80. Just because people are throwing hissy fits about ret paladins all of a sudden being more than an easy kill doesn’t mean you need to jump 12 feet in the air and start changing things left and right.

Take a step back… watch things evolven and you’ll end up with better results in the end.